Progress, and why the "Patrons Only" update has been put off until next week.

The biggest news this week is that we finally tracked down the causes of a persistent issue with certain rock colliders.

Those who have played our alpha releases to-date know the story:  depending on how the cat approached a particular rock or piece of vegetation, they had a chance of passing through them.  You can check out a video here.  

This was incredibly vexing for the longest time, because we couldn’t be sure of the full solution until we had the controller Beta-Ready.  The only way I could sniff out the problem was to create a number of external Unity projects, each with only the systems directly involved.  It required half a day of very repetitive work - but in the end, we finally slew the beast.

It was the fault of three systems:

One was simply putting the rock colliders in the wrong “Place” relative to the game world as a whole.  

A second system required special coding, to accommodate the rock spawner.

The third was using different criteria for what the raycaster considered a “collider” when the cat was walking, as opposed to jumping.

This was one of the last obstacles to proper cat movement around the island, and it was very gratifying to see the cats able to walk on the rocky beaches as intended.

We also were able to begin re-introducing the great atmospherics and lighting that makes the game so beautiful.  During my weeks of removing extraneous & redundant colliders, I also discovered the snippets of errant code that were preventing the game’s post-processing from displaying properly - it’s so good to see the aurorae back!

There are still issues with getting the lighting just right again as of this writing, but I figure we’ll have that fixed by the end of tomorrow - Just in time to address the bug reports from our playtesters!

Speaking of which, we got our first report back today!  The 48-pages(!) opened our eyes to a few problems we had missed, and a few we have already addressed, since the release of the latest playtest version.

We intend to send out another playtest in about nine days - once we’ve fixed all the submitted bugs.  So much has been fixed in just the past week, that the build that the playtesters currently have is already outdated.

Laura continues with adding real-world details - Aside from working on the Alpha version of the Portly Puffin interior, one of the MANY things she dealt with over the past week was placing piles of firewood and propane tanks.  These might seen nebulous amd unimportant, but they are one of the many things that we want to add over the coming weeks, to add more of the common "visual noise" that makes the island look a little more "real" and "lived in."

Plus: These are ubiquitous out on the islands, where they never know when their electricity might short out for hours or perhaps days at a time (and of course, they might give a cat access to places otherwise inaccessible.)

Lance has re-introduced a proper “hunting” mechanic.  When you aim-jump in “sneak” mode, the camera switches to a point right behind the cat’s ears, which allows you to more accurately grab any prey that might come along.

We also got much closer to the Beta version of the system that governs the stats of each cat - but we’re still mid-job, and I don’t feel comfy going into too much detail, right now.

We were planning a members-only update this evening, but we had to put it off until next week.  This is because we wanted to discuss a bit of the thought that goes into creating the three critical paths that have to weave themselves through the stories & structures that the player will encounter in Peace Island.

In the tradition of other games such as "Nier Automata" and "Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines," we want to make the game MORE enjoyable, should the player take the time to investigate all possible outcomes.

Writing this sort of narrative is NOT EASY.  It requires keeping track of every possibility & choke point that might occur in three different stories that have to play out in concurrent time - and you need to do a surprising amount of MATH, as well.

Witing such an update required time that we couldn't spare, due to the rapid progress we've been making as of late. I know this sounds like some sort of "humble brag" - but it's literally true - every day, we're adding new stuff!

We'll talk about that, next week - thanks again for everyone's patience, support, and confidence!

PS:  For those who might be wondering about Olivia, she's now lived longer in our apartment than she has in any other place, throughout her tumultuous early life.  She's made the place her own, and gets along with just about everyone!